I’m very excited to be joining Jim Lane of the Biofuels Digest, Dr. Ari Axelrod, currently an adjunct professor at the Fletcher School of Management, and Mackinnon Lawrence from sunny California, to form Biomass Advisors. We launched today, and this post describes the mission and philosophy of the organization.
Each member of the team, individually and collectively, is committed to fostering a carbon-neutral energy future. We also share the common belief that there is no single answer to the vexing global problem of weaning modern industrial society – and the developing world – from fossil fuels.
Our mission is to foster the growth of renewable energy industries, companies, facilities and economies by supporting the development and expansion of a comprehensive renewable energy ecosystem, an ecoenergy ecosystem if you will.
We believe we can do this by mapping advances in biomass to energy technologies to the energy needs, and the energy generation and delivery economy.
Bioenergy has the capability of transforming waste products – non-edible biomass from agriculture, trash, sewage, industrial waste – into energy.
Algae has the potential to produce huge increases in biofuel output per land area, and to sequester CO2 emissions (indeed, algae gets a major boost from C02 waste streams).
Non-food crops such as Jatropha have the potential to convert wastelands into indigenous fuel producing meccas.
New anaerobic techniques and technologies have the ability to convert sewage into high energy biogas.
New advances in microbes and industrial engineering are able to create ethanol from cellulosic agricultural wastes like corn stover, moving us away from food versus fuel debates. And let’s not forget the 3 billion gallons per year of waste cooking oil the United States drains per year (all of which can be converted to biodiesel), the 11 billion pounds of animal fats we generate per year (enough for 1.5 billion gallons of biodiesel), or the six pounds of municipal solid waste we produce per person per day (which can be converted into syngas and biofuels.
Our philosophy is that all of this, and more, can, and should, become energy.
That’s not to say that recycling isn’t important – it is. Solar energy, wind energy, geothermal, hydro – all of these are of critical importance as well.
But no matter how you slice it, America is, and will remain, really good at producing trash and buying and driving cars. Maybe someday we will all drive around in electric cars powered by the sun and the wind. But if we do, that day is a long, long way off. And even if and when we do, what will we do with all our trash? Landfill it or turn it into energy?
By the way, I haven’t heard of an electric jet – not yet anyways. So we’re going to need fuel in some form or another, for a long, long time.
Energy from biological life forms isn’t just viable, it’s how the petroleum of the world was created in the first place. Many scientists believe that the world’s ever-dwindling petroleum reserves were created by ancient algae blooms and the slick oily deposits they created. By dredging them up and combusting them, we are releasing the stored CO2 into the atmosphere. A recipe for trouble, especially when you start talking about combusting several hundred million years worth of sequestered CO2 (that’s a lot of dinosaur breath).
We envision a new world of distributed energy generation where municipalities stop shipping solid waste hundreds of miles to faraway landfills, and start using it locally to create biodiesel for their town trucks and syn gas for our barbeque grills.
We envision a world where impoverished nations with no access to energy can grow energy crops in decrepit soil, without irrigation, then use the crops to create fuel and animal feed.
We also envision a world of sustainable, organically-based chemistry. Plastic biodegradable bottles made from corn husks, shampoo made from glycerins by-products from biodiesel refineries and high-protein animal feed from algae fuel by-products.
Each of us, Jim, Ari, Mackinnon and I, figure that the best way we can help this come along is by analyzing technology, understanding the economics, marriage making between technology developers, project developers, equipment suppliers, financiers, transportation equipment makers, chemical companies, consumer product and pharmaceutical companies, agribusinesses and more.
There’s a big value chain to put together. A petroleum-based economy and industrial organization to reassemble, a long-haul petroleum fuel infrastructure to refurbish, plants to build, projects to finance, crops to plant, and more. There’s also a whole lot of citizens, elected officials, municipal engineers and regulators to educate.
We figure we can help do a lot of this.
See our new Biomass Advisors website for more information. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Biofuels Digest for daily updates on the emerging world of biologically-based renewable energy.
